>> This is James Newberry.
I'm here with Andre Kessler on November 14th, 2013,
at the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Kessler, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes.
>> When and where were you born?
>> I was born in Bucharest,
Romania March 8th,
1940 and my name at that time was Andre Jonel Grenfelt.
>> And can you describe
your earliest memories of life in Bucharest?
>> Well, earliest memories were Good ones.
We had even though Romania was part of the allies of
the Nazi Germany and they followed
the Nuremberg laws up until December 1942,
when my father was arrested,
we had a fairly decent life.
Of course, they had confiscated telephones.
Jews were not allowed to have telephones,
not allowed to have radios,
but we were in our own apartment
and It was a fairly good life as a three-year-old.
Most of the time, I ate slept,
but it was a good life.
>> And what did your father do for a living?
>> My father owned two men's shirt factories.
They manufactured men's shirts like
[inaudible] and place people like that.
When it became against the law for Jews to
own property and hire non-Jews,
he had a Christian partner
that he sold the business to on paper.
So he still worked for the company,
but he no longer owned it.
So he was in manufacturing shirt business.
>> And your mother?
>> My mother was a housewife.
She she just lived in the apartment and brand
a family and make sure that everything was ready.
We had a housekeeper.
So she supervised the cooking
and cleaning and things like that.
And then of course, then it became against
the law to employ that housekeeper.
So my mother took over the duties. She ran the house.
>> And what role did
your Jewish faith identity play
in your life at that time, your parents' lives?
>> Well, my parents were orthodox Jews.
They were very observant.
My mother lit candles every Friday night.
The holidays were observed.
Well, when I was born,
when I came into this world,
it was against the law to have Jewish ceremonies.
So my father went and smuggled the mole,
the one who does the ritual circumcision,
smuggled him into our apartment,
and he had his tools inside his coat pocket.
It sterilized them in our apartment and
on the eighth day of my life,
I was circumcised in secret in our own apartment.
So that was the way things were done then.
It was against the law to have Jewish celebrations,
any kind of Jewish observances.
>> And why do you
think the Nazis were able to come to power in Germany?
>> Oh, I don't. I mean,
it was the whole thing with the world economy
with Germany was severely
punished after First World War with
the failure of the stock market
here in the United States, carried over to Europe.
Unemployment was rampant in
all of Europe, including Romania.
So the Nazis promised bread,
work and freedom back
to the Old Germany and that's how they came into power.
>> And what sort of
fascist groups in Romania popped up in years?
>> They were known as the Iron Guard.
They were very strong fascist group.
General Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
was in charge of the Iron Guard.
They just King Carol abdicated.
He was forced to abdicate,
and Atonscu took power.
So they were not
as virulently anti-Jewish as
the Nazis and the Hungarians,
which were the Hungarians were the arrow cross.
They all gave themselves fancy names.
And I'm using the translation into English.
And the Hungarians were
Nilosh and the Iron Guard [inaudible].
King Carol, who's still the power behind the throne told
General Marshal Antonco He even promoted himself.
He says, leave our Jews alone.
Any territory that you conquer is fair game.
They gave in 1940
as part of the deal for
Romania for the Hungarians to come into the war.
They took that section that was
Hungary prior to 1918 and gave it to the Romanians.
They gave it back to the Hungarians.
So those territories were fair game.
The Romanians fought alongside
the German Army and
territories that were conquered were fair game.
They took over a lot of those territories.
Romania did not have an extermination camp.
They did not systematically murder the Jews like they
did in Auschwitz Dachau and Bergen Belsen and so on.
They had a slave labor camp known as Transnistria.
Okay. And that's where my father,
when he was arrested in December of 1942,
was taken to Transnistria.
The people who died at Transnistria died
of disease, malnutrition, and overwork.
My father was a large man.
He was six-four,
and he weighed 246 pounds when he was arrested.
He survived and he came back in August of 1945.
He was still six four, but he weighed 132 pounds.
They had almost literally worked him to death.
He dug ditches, sveled snow,
worked on a bomb repairs,
anything that the Romanians
under Nazi supervision found for him to do, he did.
And for that, his reward was
a bowl of water super day and a
piece of bread that was mainly made of sawdust.
The barracks there, they slept on straw.
The Romanians Theard even said
that it wasn't worth wasting a bullet on a shoe.
If they died, they died.
There was no medical treatment or things like that.
But he survived.
He came home in August of 1945.
>> So as these anti-Jewish laws,
did they go into effect
in Romania once Romania joined the access power?
>> Yes, they did.
>> How did that play that play out?
>> Well, again, it was just certain laws,
synagogues were closed.
Jewish businesses were confiscated.
There became round-up certain times
when the iron guard wanted to
show their German partners
how well they forbade their laws.
They would have a round-up of Jews in Bucharest,
and one of the most notorious ones is they took them out
to the stockyards and
butchered them and hung them on meat hooks.
There was, if I remember
correctly my dates because again I was a child,
there were over 300 people,
men, women, and children butchered at the stockyards.
So every once in a while,
they had a round-up of Jews but most of the time,
the ones who came from
Northern Romania from Turnowitz and places like that,
they were sent to Transnistria.
>> So let's talk about then your time in hiding because
your father is at a work camp as of 1942,
and so life is changing.
And what did your mother do at this time as they began
to institute laws and
require the wearing of yellow stars?
>> My mother refused. My mother
I always say was a very stubborn lady.
When the decree came out for the Jews of Romania to
sow the yellow star of David
upon their clothing, she refused.
She didn't sow it onto hers or onto mine.
We were fortunate in the fact
that my mother did not look like
the typical stereotype of
what a Jew was supposed to look like.
My mother had blond hair and blue eyes.
So when my father was arrested,
I owe my life to my mother and to
what we now call a righteous Gentile.
Gheorghe Popescu was the superintendent
of the apartment building where my family
lived and he and
my mother got together and decided
that we should go into hiding.
We were able to go into hiding
in our own apartment because
the area where we lived was around the King's Palace,
the Parliament building, and it was
declared a no-live zone.
Romania was a very vital part of
the German war machinery because
they had deployed us to oil fields.
So we were bombed by the Americans during the day and
the British at night
and when they had extra bombs left over,
they would come back over Bucharest and try to bomb
the King's Palace and the Parliament building,
so that area was declared a no-live zone.
So we lived in our own apartment,
we went to hiding in our own apartment.
The windows had been darkened and
blankets and sheets had been shoved on the door
so no sound would come out and that's where I spent
the next 16 months of
my life was in that apartment building.
The smallest room in
the house was what was my parents' library.
She chose it because it was
the smallest room in the house,
but it was also the room that was
closest to the bathroom so when
the water worked because
of the bombings and things like that,
she put a lot of water into me so I was full.
The staple food of Romania is
a corn meal-based concoction called
mamaliga and that's what we ate when we could get it.
Gheorghe would go out into
the black market and buy the corn meal.
But what we didn't know is not
only did he hide my mother and myself,
but he also hid two other
Jewish families in that building.
And we didn't know about each other because he
was afraid that if one of us was captured,
we would betray the other two.
So Gheorghe is indeed,
a righteous amongst the nations.
When I went to Israel for the first time in 1969,
outside of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem,
Yad Vashem is a grove of
trees dedicated to
the righteous Gentiles, Oskar Schindler,
Raoul Wallenberg, the Japanese counsel who gave
forged documents to Jews so they could go into China.
And I had a tree planted in Gheorghe's honor.
So he is amongst
the righteous Gentiles at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
So we stayed in that apartment for 16 months.
One of the ways my mother kept
me busy because I was a very active child,
and I could hear children outside playing and I wanted to
know why I couldn't go out and play and she gave
me the typical parents' answer because I said so.
But one of the ways she kept me busy is as I said,
that room was my parents' library.
Both my parents were avid readers,
and she started to teach me how to
read and write and by the time
we came out of hiding when I was almost five,
I could read and write in two languages
both in Romania and Hungarian.
So it was long days,
especially in the wintertime because
Romania in the winter gets
dark very early and late
very late so we did a lot of sleeping,
a lot of studying, and that's how we passed the days.
>> And you said there were bombs being dropped
on the Parliament building and the palace.
Was this frightening?
Did this interrupt your daily life?
>> Well, the only time we really
got scared is a bomb fell at
the end of our street and it
shattered one of the windows in our apartment.
So that was frightening.
But when the array sirens run off,
we were under the bed.
We couldn't go to the array shelters.
We were afraid that somebody would recognize us
and we would be betrayed.
So when the bombs went off and
the array sirens went off, we hid under the bed.
>> And did you ever go outside?
>> No. I was in the apartment for 16 months.
>> And how did you receive information from the outside?
>> From Gheorghe. He kept
us advised of what was going on.
Of course, being non-Jewish,
he had the privilege of having a radio.
So he listened to the propaganda
and who knew what was true and what wasn't true?
But we kept up with events through Gheorghe.
>> And I know you were very young,
but did you get some sense later of what your mother
was anticipating would happen down the road,
or did she have
any sense of when there would be an ending?
>> It's like most parents,
she kept me secure.
She didn't want to scare me.
She didn't want to alert me.
She kept a lot of things to herself.
>> And no word from your father at this time?
>> No. Of course, not. He didn't know where we were.
When he was liberated,
the Russian troops came in and liberated Romania at
the end of 1944, beginning in 1945.
So he was freed, but of course,
he was sick so
they put him into what was called a sanatorium,
a hospital for him to recover.
He came back and when he walked
into the apartment, I didn't recognize him.
I hid behind my mother.
I didn't know who that strange man was.
I don't even know where he got
the overcoat he was wearing,
but it was four times too big on him.
He was a mere skeleton of the man I remembered so it took
a while for me to get used again to
the idea that this strange man was my father.
When everything started growing back to normalcy,
they put me into school.
I went into first grade, but I had a problem.
I did not know how to associate with
other children because I had spent
16 months of my life in that apartment.
So I was so called
problem child when a child
said something to me I didn't like,
I either hit or I bit.
But we got over that and my father got
his factories back from his partner
who was a very righteous man.
He did give them back his businesses.
In 1947, Romania became a communist dictatorship.
And they came to my father one morning and said,
the factories he owned have now
been nationalized that he will still run them,
but he will no longer own them.
So as I said,
my mother was stubborn.
My father was not to be outdone.
He arranged for my mother and
I to escape across two borders.
We went from Romania into Hungary, Hungary into Austria.
There were people who knew where the gaps
in the barbed wire were and
when it was a good night to cross.
When my mother and I got to
the Romanian Hungarian border and
these people saw that I was
an eight year old boy, they panicked.
They were afraid that I would make
a noise and give them away.
So in addition to whatever money my father had paid them,
then there was nothing wrong with that because
they risked their lives to do this.
My mother took off the jewelry
she was wearing and gave it to them.
So they decided it was okay to take the risk.
This day, I still remember the sounds of the guards,
the smell of their cigarette smoke
and the barking of dogs.
We crossed over.
It was a very dark moonless night,
and we crossed over into
Hungary and we were walking across
the fields in Hungary and
my mother stepped into a pothole,
and she severely sprayed her ankle.
So when we got to Budapest,
we went to what was called a safe house.
I was right back in
the apartment of don't make any noise,
don't draw attention to yourself,
don't speak to anyone.
And it didn't last long.
Within a 3-4 week period,
my mother's ankle healed and we went to
the Hungarian Austrian border.
And again, there were people there to guide us.
We went across, crossed over,
and we were getting ready to board a bus to go into
Vienna and we were arrested by the Austrian police.
Luckily, it was the Austrians
because it would have been the Russians.
They would have sent us right back to Bucharest,
and we would wound up probably in prison somewhere.
But we were a group of
other people and they talked to the Austrians and
convinced them that we were so called
political refugees and they
put us on the bus and sent us into Vienna.
My parents had arranged for a telephone conversation.
And when my mother said a certain key word to my father,
he knew that we were safe in Austria.
So he arranged for him for himself to get out.
But before he did,
he had gotten hold of some explosives and he
planted them on timers and he went
across the border and when the Romanians went
to look for their factors in the morning all
they found was rubble, he had blown them up.
So well, almost on a daily basis,
my wife looks at me and says,
you're so dug stubborn.
I said, Yes, I'm.
I get it legitimately.
I come from two very stubborn people.
He joined us in Vienna.
And when we got there,
they told us that it would be
at least 3-5 years before we could even
think about coming to the United States
because there was an immigration quota.
My mother had two brothers
who had come to the United States.
My Uncle Alex came to the United States in 1929.
My other uncle, my Uncle Emery,
got out of Romania in 1940 and went to Palestine.
There was no such thing as Israel.
He went to Palestine.
They stayed in Palestine for two years and then came to
the United States in 1942.
In 1943, he enlisted in the United States army
and he was with the second wave of
the 29th infantry division at the Normandy landings.
So even with them
guaranteeing that we would not be a burden to the state,
that my mother would not collect
unemployment, things like that,
it still told us it would be
at least 3-5 years before we could come here.
My father had two brothers
who had gone to France prior to the Second World War.
When my uncle Yanos wanted to go to medical school,
as liberal as Romania was in th late 20s,
early 30s, he was declined.
They had a quota, they would only take so many Jews.
So he went to France and got
his medical degree from
the Sorbonne the University of Paris.
He had sent for one of his younger brothers.
Now, I have a tremendous family.
My mother was one of six children.
My father was one of 13.
So I had a lot of family.
But during Second World War,
both my uncles who lived in
France were with the French resistance.
They had arranged for their families.
They had shipped their families to London.
So one was a doctor and the other one was a fighter.
I have two Uncle Emery,
one from my mother's side,
one from my father's side.
Emery is a very common Hungarian name,
and bearing the war,
they fought against the Nazi occupation.
My Uncle Emery,
who was the fighter, despised Nazi so much.
I can say this on the film.
He was a killing machine. Every time he ran across one,
then that was the end of that.
He was decorated with the legion of merit the [inaudible].
So my parents decided that my father was a lot easier to
go to France from
from Austria than it was come to the United States.
So he joined his brothers and the deal with my parents
were that whoever was able to
support the other one would eventually join them.
Well, I wound up not seeing my father again for 13 years.
>> And you were able to
immigrate to the United States in what year?
>> We finally got our papers in March of 1951.
We left Vienna and went to Bremerhaven in Germany,
where the ships sailed from.
But they only sailed once a week,
and we wound up in what was called
a displaced persons camp.
It was an old German army camp.
I don't know if they didn't want us to
associate with the Germans and
Germans associate with us,
but for the first time in my life,
I was behind barbed wire.
We were in the camp with
other people waiting to be
able to board ships to come to the United States.
During the day, I went to classes.
Now, while we lived in Vienna,
I went to school for
the children of the French occupation forces.
My uncles arranged for me to go to
the school for the children of
the French occupation forces.
So I spoke French during the day
and German at night
because that's the language of Austria,
but in the camp,
they were teaching us English.
That was the first time I was learning English because,
of course, we were coming to the United States.
He had recreation for us.
The living facilities were not,
I was still with my mother.
I was in the barracks with my mother and the other women.
In August 7th,
1951, we boarded
a very small former troop ship that used to
bring troops from the United States to Europe.
It was the SS General Sturgis
And when we boarded the ship at 11 years old,
I was a pretty big kid.
They decided that I didn't belong in with the women.
So they had a woman section and they had a man section,
and they put me in with the men.
As an 11 year old child,
it was very traumatic because
for the first time in my life,
I was separated from my mother.
But then I discovered
that food was plentiful aboard ship.
I could eat as much as I wanted to,
when I wanted to.
And since my mother spent the 10 days that
took the cross in her buck
because she was terribly seasick.
I had my first taste of freedom.
I roamed the ship.
A very nice gentleman agreed to take care of me,
but he was doing things that the men
aboard ship did play cards and things like that.
I was always hanging over the side,
had very low railings.
They were afraid I was going
to fall [LAUGHTER] overboard.
But it was my first taste of freedom.
We landed in New York City August 17th, 1951.
We did not come through Ellis Island.
We landed on the Hudson River in New York.
My mother's brother, Emery,
was there to pick us up along with my cousin, Marty.
And my first recollection of
the United States is my Uncle Emery
drove a Buick convertible.
And we went down from
the Hudson River from the Docks down Broadway,
and it was getting dark.
And you could see all the lights
lighting up on Broadway and had
a camel cigarette advertisement
where the guy was blowing smoke rings.
And that's my first recollection of the United States.
We went to my Uncle Alex's house in Queens.
This was a Friday.
And from Friday until Sunday night,
my mother and her brothers
sat in the kitchen and talked about,
do you remember what happened to this one?
Did this one survive?
Where did you know,
what happened to our parents.
In 1944,
Adolf Chuman who was the head of the Gestapo OSS,
had came up with the final solution
for the Hungarian Jews.
My grandparents, aunts, uncles,
and a lot of my cousins were rounded up,
sealed into cattle cars and shipped to
the Auschwitz Pekan Concentration Camp in Poland.
The managed to exterminate most of
the Hungarian Jewish population
within an 11 month period.
It took them almost four years to do
it in Germany and occupied territories,
but the Hungarian Jews didn't
even bother most of the time when you got to the camps,
the tattooed number into your arm.
With the Hungarian Jews,
they didn't even bother to do that because most
of them sent straight to the gas chambers.
My grandfather never made it to Auschwitz.
When he and my grandmother were arrested,
they were put into separate cattle cars.
My grandfather raised such a ruckus that
the Hungarian guards opened the cattle car he was in,
took him out, beat him to death,
and threw his body in with my grandmother.
My grandmother, aunts,
and a lot of my cousins
went straight to the gas chambers.
So the only reason we
know this story is that my mother's cousin,
Ann, in town where they lived in Romania,
most of these cities had three names.
It had a Romanian name,
it had a Hungarian name,
and it had a German name because at one time,
it was part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
In Romania, it was called Pare Mara.
In Hungarian, it was called Ntaaro.
In German, it was Gross karai.
So my grandfather and
grandmother lived on this Auschwitz Street.
His brother and family lived on the other side.
The windows faced each other.
Her cousin Ann was 24,
25 years old when she was sent to Auschwitz.
But she was selected for labor.
Okay. When we associate
Auschwitz Birkenau we associate as
an extermination camp and as well as the
almost 2.5 million people who were murdered there.
But they also had uniform factories, knapsack factories.
They had shoe factories.
They even had a coal mine.
So if you were young and healthy and able body,
you were selected for labor.
So my cousin Ann was selected for labor.
So she knew the story of my family.
She watched her mother, father,
my grandmother and go straight up to
the gas chambers because they were older sickly people.
The interesting part is,
is that the most notorious of
the SS doctors who did the selection
at Auschwitz was a man by the name of Joseph Mengel.
Doctor Mengel was known as
the Angel of Death at Auschwitz.
He was obsessed with genetics.
He wanted to see how he could produce
multiple births in German women.
So if you were a twin when you got off the train,
or if you had any kind of an unusual deformity,
you were taken to his laboratory and
experimentation was conducted upon you.
My great uncle, Professor Doctor Herman Kessler of
Budapest Hungary was one of
the Jewish doctors who was
forced to work with Doctor Mengel.
When Auschwitz was shut
down when it was closed because
the Russians were closing in on it,
and the inmates who survived were
forced to go on what was called the death march.
They marched them back into Germany.
My Uncle Herman dove into a pile of human excrement,
and that's how he survived.
When he heard Russian being spoken, he came out.
That was how he survived because
they were didn't want any witnesses.
They didn't want anybody to know what they had done.
So they were murdering the ones who worked with Mengel.
But when my uncle was well into his 80s,
I went back to Budapest and I
sat with him in the department and I tape recorded him.
He wanted the world to know what he had witnessed.
The tape, which is now a CD is at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington DC.
So anyway, my mother and
her brothers were talking
in the kitchen of my uncle's apartment.
And Sunday night, they said to her,
my mother's name was Olga.
They said, "Olga, this is America.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Starting tomorrow, you're going to work."
They got her a job in a doll factory.
She worked from three o'clock
in the afternoon to 11 o'clock at
night and her job was stapling the clothes onto the doll.
Well, at the end of the first week,
her hand had swollen up to a size of
a catcher's mitt from constantly doing this,
stapling the clothes on a doll.
So she left that job and one of Jewish organizations,
I don't remember if it was hires or joint,
got her a job in a textile factory.
She spoke four or five different languages,
but she was starting to learn English.
One of the first rules she
said was when we got here is that we were
not to speak Hungarian or
Romanian in the house. Spoke English.
I went to school. I learned English in school.
She learned English.
She got herself in New York.
There were tabloids, the Mirror,
the New York Daily News and there were pictures in there.
The Times was too sophisticated for her.
So she had an English Hungarian dictionary,
they had the pictures and she would
look at the pictures in the words.
And when she didn't understand a certain words,
she would look it up in the dictionary and translate it,
and that's how she learned her English.
She never lost her accent.
She sounded like Zsa Zsa Gabor
but she spoke fluent English.
When she passed away in 1994,
she spoke fluent English.
She went to work at this textile company,
and by the time she left there 20 some odd years later,
she was in charge of the sample department
[LAUGHTER] I got sent.
The law in New York is that the day after labor day,
you have to start school.
So they put me in the sixth grade,
but I had the problem there too.
I didn't speak any English. I spoke four other languages,
but English was not one of them.
They didn't have help for foreign students in those days.
If you kept up, fine.
If you didn't, the teacher
didn't have time to occupy himself or herself
with you because the school I
went to New York public School
125 didn't have courses for foreign students.
They still didn't know what to do
with the immigrant children who came.
So there were 50 kids in my homeroom class alone.
But I have a very good ear for languages.
So within an eighth month to a one year period,
I had a working knowledge of English.
I had an accent. You could cut with a knife,
but I had a working knowledge of English.
So that's how I learned my English.
>> And you were an athlete in school?
>> Well, let's go
back a little bit before we get into that.
My mother would leave our apartment.
We had a very small apartment in
the section of New York called Sunnyside in Queens.
And where she worked,
the textile company was in Manhattan.
So she would leave the house 7:00,
7:15 in the morning.
We lived a block and a half from the subway system.
So she would leave the house 7:00,
7:15 in the morning and come home
at 5:30, 6:00 at night.
So I was on my own until it was time to go to school.
But the neighborhood we lived in was not,
shall we say the very best.
It was a multicultural multiethnic neighborhood.
We had people from Eastern Europe.
We had Irish.
We had Hispanic.
It was, again,
multicultural, multiethnic group.
But I was one of
those kids that when I felt like going to school, I did.
When I didn't feel like going to school, I didn't.
When the letters started to
come telling my mother I was truant,
at first, I explained to her that there were letters of
commendation about how well I was learning English.
Well, I got away with that
until she started to learn English.
But I learned in school
what social promotions were because as you said,
I was very fortunate I was a very good athlete.
My father was an excellent athlete.
He was a soccer player in Romania or football,
as they call it there.
One of the reasons he was
known and one of the reasons he was
targeted is that in 1938,
when it became against the law for
Jews to associate with non Jews,
he formed a totally Jewish football team,
him and two of his brothers.
And they challenged the Romanian national team
to a football match,
and they even had the audacity to defeat them.
Right after the game was over,
they were all arrested,
taken to jail and had
the live in daylights beaten out of them.
But I inherited his athletic skills.
I played five sports in school.
I played basketball, baseball,
soccer, football, track.
And then I was on something that they
would not even dare to have today.
I was on a rifle team.
They gave us 22 caliber rifles
and we went out and target shot.
So I was passed along.
If a teacher didn't give me a passing grade,
there were five coaches in there screaming at them.
So yes, not only did I do my studies,
but I also played sports.
In my junior year
in high school before I became a senior,
I was recruited by a lot
of colleges to play basketball for them.
Basketball was my strong suit.
But two weeks before I was ready to graduate high school,
I got into some serious trouble.
I was taken in front of
a judge and I was given two choices,
either enlisted in the military or go to jail.
Well, I didn't know what the military was all about,
but I had pretty good idea what jail was all about.
So I was escorted from the judge's chambers to
the Navy recruiting station
that was in the same building as the courthouse.
It could have been any branch of the service,
but the judge happened to be in
the Navy during the Second World War.
So that very afternoon,
I was on my way to Great Lakes,
Illinois for basic training.
I had orders to report to Navy hospital course school.
I had orders to become a medic.
And about 3, 4 days before I
was ready to graduate from basic training,
an officer and our company commander,
who was the chief petty officer
came walking through the barracks and they said,
"Everybody, six foot and
over stand in front of your bunks."
So I stood in front of my bunk
and this officer came down and he said,
"How tall are you son?"
Now, I laughed with son.
I was 18.
He must have been all of 24,
but he referred to everybody as son.
All enlisted men were son.
I looked at him, at that time,
I was 6'3", 6'4".
He says, how would you like to go to Washington,
DC and be part of the Navy ceremonial honor guard.
And I said, what's that?
He says, "Well, you go to
Washington and you march in parades,
you go out to
Arlington during funerals for military personnel?"
I said, "But I have orders to
go to hospital course school.
He says, "I promise you
now this is considered choice duty.
You can only stay 13 months in Washington.
And when your 13 months are up,
you can go back and become a hospital corpsman."
I said, "That sounds like a good deal, Washington, DC."
So I went down to Washington.
I was with the Navy ceremonial honor guard.
We were 84 men.
I was the only Jew. I did experience some anti-semitism,
took care of that real fast.
And I was selected for White House Color Guard.
I stood when the President Eisenhower,
when he had state dinners and things like that,
all of us were at the military carried
the different incense of the different military units.
I was carrying the Navy flag.
Well, the FBI and
the Secret Service did a background check
on me and they discovered that I wasn't a citizen.
I hadn't become a citizen yet.
So the second time,
I was taken in front of a judge [LAUGHTER] and I
was sworn as a citizen that very day.
So I spent the 13 months there.
When my time was up, like he promised,
I was sent back up to Great Lakes,
Illinois and went through Hospital Corp school.
And graduated at Hospital Corp school,
and I get my orders to report to Camp Lejeune,
North Carolina to be with the Marine Corps.
And I said, wait a minute, I enlisted the Navy.
What is this Marine Corps bed?
Well, Marine Corps and don't sell
this to a Marine because they'll fight you on it,
but the Marines are part of the Navy department.
They don't have their own medical personnel.
So us as Navy Corpsman
are stationed with the Marines and take care of them.
I had been promoted,
the day I graduated
Hospital Corp school I had to time in,
so I became a third class petty officer.
And I was selected to go with President Kennedy,
[inaudible] Kennedy, they all
formed what they called was the elite,
the green berets, the Navy Seals, things like that.
The Marines were known as
Reconnaissance Marines as recon.
And I wound up with the Reconnaissance Marines.
And lucky me, I even got to go to Fort Benning,
Georgia to learn how to jump out of an airplane.
[LAUGHTER] I always laugh
because it's not a natural act to
jump out of a perfectly good airplane,
but that's what I wound up doing.
We wore Marine uniforms with Navy insignia.
The only Marine uniform we were
not allowed to wear was their dress blouse.
So I got to jump out of an airplane.
While I was in Washington,
since all of us in
the [inaudible] guard were six foot and over,
we formed a basketball team,
and we went around and played other military places,
in some schools and things like that.
And one night we were playing somewhere in one of
the schools and I had
one of those nights that you dream about.
I scored 52 points and this guy
came up to me and introduced himself,
handed me his card, and it said,
New York University,
Athletic Department Chief Scout.
And he said to me, how much time
do you have left in the Navy?
And I said, about four years.
He says, if we can get you an early discharge,
would you be interested in coming to
New York University playing basketball for us?
I said, sure.
Why not. Yeah, whatever.
Well, I didn't hear from
him for another year and a half.
And I said, okay.
That was a nice BS story afterwards.
Well, next thing I know,
I'm down at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
I was in my barracks and the officer,
the SEO of the day comes to me and says,
Kessler you got a visitor.
And I said, who would visit
me at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina?
So I went to Day Room and sure
enough, it was this gentleman.
And he says, ''we have arranged
for you to get an early discharge.
And you will be discharged in
October and school starts in November.''
But what they did in those days,
you could not play
varsity basketball until you were a sophomore.
As a freshman you had to play junior varsity.
Well, they arranged that they gave me credit for
all the courses I had taken while I was in the Navy,
and I entered school as a sophomore.
So I was able to play varsity basketball.
NYU in those days was a powerhouse.
We were one of the strongest teams in the country.
Before the NCAA was the NITs,
we won the NIT three years in a row.
I'm going to throw names at you that most of
the time that only older people recognize.
But I was on a team with Sat Sanders,
Hap Hairston, Mal White, Barry Kramer.
We hold the distinction that all five of us
who were on the starting team
later on went to play in the NBA.
The closest that came to it was Michigan State and
UNLV where four of their starters played NBA ball.
When I went to NYU not only did I play basketball,
but I also went to classes.
Our coach Lou Rossini,
may he rest in peace,
insisted that we go to classes.
It wasn't like today when they can graduate they can play
one year of basketball and then
next year they go onto the NBA.
You could only go into the NBA when your class graduated.
So I have a bachelor
of science in business administration
from New York University.
Anyhow, when I graduated from NYU,
I was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors who are
now Golden State of the NBA,
and I played two years of
professional basketball for the Philadelphia Warriors.
>> So in the NBA who did you room with?
>> My roommate was
arguably the best basketball player
who ever played the game.
His name was Wilt Chamberlain.
Even though the team was owned
by a Jewish man, Mr. Gottlieb,
our traveling secretary, shall we say,
was not exactly a big fan of Jews or Blacks.
So I roomed with Wilt Chamberlain because he thought it
was really an insult to both of us
putting the black kid and the Jewish kid together.
The big guy and I became very close friends.
Unfortunately, we lost him 14 years ago at the age of 69.
But the NBA I played in,
and the NBA of today is not the same.
It was still a very small league.
We only had 10 teams.
The furthest west we would go was Minneapolis, Minnesota,
because it was the Minneapolis Lakers,
the days of George Mikan who was
the first big man in the NBA.
Some of the cities we went to like
Cincinnati and St. Louis followed the Jim Crow laws.
So the Black athletes on our team were not allowed
to stay in the same hotels that we stayed in.
My teammate from MRU Barry Kramer and myself
were both drafted by the warriors.
He was the number 1 draft pick,
I was the number 3 draft pick.
There were only four draft rounds in those days.
Barry and I and some of the other players stayed in
the same hotels as our Black players
stayed in and the police came and
arrested us for those days
for what was called civil disobedience.
What I was trying to avoid by joining
the military happened when I would
play basketball, I was wound up in jail.
[LAUGHTER] The traveling secretary
had to come and bail us out so
we could play the game that night.
We have enough players.
So it was a very entirely different NBA than of today.
Coach Rossini must have been prophetic.
My knees gave out.
I had to retire.
They didn't have the surgeries in
those days that they have today.
So I retired and I went to work for a textile company.
The sales manager was
a very nice man by the name of Frank Murphy,
may rest in peace.
Those days, I was known as Andy.
I tried to become as much of
Americanized as possible and I was known as Andy.
My nickname in the NBA was Tiny.
I was Tiny Kessler.
So he says, "Andy",
he says, "We're going to promote you.
You're going to become our Southeastern salesman."
And I said, "Southeast, what do you mean?"
I said, "Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington.
What do you mean the Southeast?"
He says, "No, you're going to be
headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
And you're going to be traveling Georgia, Alabama,
Tennessee, Mississippi, North of South Carolina."
And I looked at him.
I said, "Frank, you got to be kidding me."
I said, "Those people run
around without shoes down there.
I'm not going down to Georgia."
He says, "I'll tell you what."
He says, "Try it for six months.
If you don't like it,
come back to New York.
We'll find a different job for you."
He says, "But my feeling is," he says,
"You'll be living there within
six months." Well, he was wrong.
I was living here within three.
I fell in love with the City of Atlanta.
I fell in love with Georgia.
But one of the first things I did when I
got here is I took
the New York plate off my car and put
a Georgia tag because
it was the days of the freedom riders.
And if I went into Alabama
and places like that with a New York tag on there,
they would think I was one of the freedom riders and I
would be arrested or murdered or something like that.
But I fell in love with the state of Georgia.
I traveled here.
I lived in Atlanta.
I was a confirmed bachelor.
I was single. I was 33 years old.
I was never getting married.
My mother, may she rest in peace,
always told me I was a bum,
and I asked her why was I a bum because you're
33 years old and you're not married.
I reunited with my father in 1961.
He never came to this country.
He stayed in France.
And every time I would go visit him,
he would arrange dates for me with all his Jewish friends
because he thought I wasn't married because there were
no Jewish girls in the United States.
Well, in 1973, I met a very lovely lady from Savannah,
Georgia, and within six months,
my bachelorhood went right out the window.
Everything goes well,
we will celebrate
our 40th wedding anniversary in November.
We have two children.
Our daughter is 37.
She graduated from Georgia Southern University,
and she works for the Kroger Corporation in management.
She got married five years ago.
My son in law, Rusty,
purely by coincidence, is also an ex Navy corpsman.
He spent eight years in the Navy.
And I tease my daughter that she married her father.
She doesn't think it's funny.
They have two boys.
Benjamin is two and three quarters as he says,
our grandson Joseph was just 10 months old.
Our son is 35.
He did his undergraduate work
at the University of Georgia
and then got his masters from
Emery in public health and risk management.
He and our daughter in law Lindsay
will be married eight years.
They have a five year old son by the name of Samuel,
who just started kindergarten this year,
and I can't believe that he's five years old.
And in February, we have our princess.
Our granddaughter Jordan was born.
She's now nine months old.
So that's my family.
I'm very proud of my family.
I always say that my family,
my children and my grandchildren
are my revenge on the Nazis.
That they didn't want me here.
They wanted rid of us and I'm here,
my grandchildren are here, and they're not.
>> And you said you
saw your father again for the first time in 13 years in
1961 and can you
describe why he didn't immigrate to the United States?
>> As I told you he went to France.
And when he got to France,
he went to work for the Citroen motorcar company.
This was 1948.
He was 45 years old.
He worked from eleven o'clock at
night till seven o'clock in
the morning building cars by hand for Citroen.
In the apartment building he
lived in across the hall from
him was a lady who was also a Holocaust survivor.
And one thing led to another and one day
my mother opened a mail
and there was a divorce decree in it.
He had gone to the rabbis in Paris and said,
"Look, I'm separated from my wife.
She lives in America.
I live here in France.
We have no family.
I want a divorce."
So they granted him a divorce.
My mother had nothing to say about it.
She was not upset, by the way.
She had developed a very independent nature.
In Europe, when you went from
your father's house to your husband's house,
but she had developed a great deal of independence.
She was a very independent lady.
So she says, " Good.
I'm rid of this so and so."
So he stayed in France.
I went to reunite with him in the summer of 1961.
I found out, I met my stepmother.
And every three, four years,
as I said, I was single in those days,
I would use him as an excuse and I would go to France.
I would stay with him for about two days
and then roam all over Europe.
So that's how I reunited with my dad.
He is buried outside of Paris, France.
>> And in those years, roaming across Europe,
what was your feeling of being
back on this continent where when you were young,
you were forced to hide?
>> Well, I went back to Bucharest in 1969.
My mother has still had a sister who
lived in Cluj, Romania.
And I had a cousin there,
my cousin Tibby, and we went to Romania.
My mother did not want to come into Bucharest.
She says, "I have my memories.
I don't want to go back there. I'm staying here.
I came to visit my sister."
They hadn't seen each other in 20 some odd years.
My cousin Tibby and I went down to Bucharest,
and I wanted to see if the building
where I was hidden was still there.
And it was and I went in with
Tibby and a woman comes
out and greets me and she looks at me and she says,
" [inaudible] Greenfield, Mr.
Greenfield's." Because that's what she remembered me as.
That was my name at that time.
And it was Katya.
It was Georgio's wife.
Georgio had passed away,
but Katya and her daughter still lived in that building.
And I asked her who lived in our old apartment.
And she told me it was a lady who was
a very high official in the Romanian Communist Party.
And she says, if you go up there
and no offense to cat lovers.
She told me that she had at least dozen cats,
if not more and it was the days before Katya let her.
And if she opened the door,
if she would even let me in.
Don't be offended by the smell from the cats.
So we went up there.
I pretended that I didn't speak Romanian,
my cousin Tibby was with me,
and he told her that
this used to be my parents' apartment,
and of course, she denied that anybody
else had ever lived there besides her.
Well, I don't know how
much you know about the Jewish religion,
but on the door posts of our homes in our homes,
we have what we call a mezuzah.
I wear one around my neck.
It's a bigger version of this.
It goes back to when we were captives in Egypt,
when we were slaves in Egypt.
And when God decreed the slaying of the firstborn,
Joshua went around and painted blood
on the doors of Jewish homes,
and that's how it was the beginning of the mezuzaic,
you could still see the outlines of the mezuzah.
When a little currency exchanged hands, she let me in.
I looked around some things I recognized,
some things I didn't recognize.
So that was my way of closure there.
When I left Bucharest,
my mother went back to Budapest to be with her uncle.
I left there and I went to Auschwitz Birkenau.
And I walked in under
the gate at Auschwitz that had a sign in German,
Arbeit macht frei,
work will free you.
And I walked down main street of the old barracks.
It's still there as a museum today.
I was very fortunate that I got to go back three times.
I was invited to go back with the much of the living
twice where our children go there, they go visit.
And I even got a company.
I was asked to go with a group of
non Jewish visitors to
back to Auschwitz. It's interesting.
I don't know if you ever saw the film with Elie Wiesel
and Oprah Winfrey when they went back to Auschwitz.
Professor Wiesel and don't call
him doctor Wiesel, he doesn't like it.
I've had the privilege of meeting
Professor Wiesel three times.
When he goes back to Auschwitz,
he never raises his voice.
He speaks in a whisper because he feels it would be
an intrusion to the people who were murdered there.
So I went to this mound
of dirt that one time were human beings.
And I put on a Jewish prayer shawl,
covered my head and recited Kaddish,
the prayer for the dead.
And that was my closure at Auschwitz.
I left there and went to Israel,
and reunited with my family there.
I have three cousins from
my father's side who live in Israel.
And amazingly enough, my cousin Yaakov,
who was born as Jean Grinfeld
but when he got to Israel in 1956,
David Ben Gurion was very
serious about everybody taking Hebrew names.
He says, "Leave your past behind. "
And he became Yaakov Ben Zion,
and I started to talk with him and found out that he
is a paratrooper in Israeli ID forces.
So we're all crazy.
We both jumped out of airplane.
It must be in the genes.
So I had a very good time in Israel.
The only place I will not go back
to is I will not go to Germany.
I refuse to go to Germany.
It's a hang up on my part.
I will not buy anything that I
knowingly know is manufactured in Germany.
That's one place in Europe, I will not go.
I went back to Austria.
I went back on a trip
to see my past where we lived in Austria.
But I spent a lot of time in France. I love France.
It's just such a wonderful country.
As I said, the only place I won't go back to is Germany.
>> And when did you begin to tell
your experiences to others?
>> When the old Jewish Federation
was on Peachtree Street,
they built a museum down there.
We had a museum in a basement of the Federation building.
It was underneath the pool.
In the mornings when we opened
the museum and had people come through there,
we had to walk through and make
sure the pictures were still
on the wall because it was so damp
there from being underneath
the pool that the pictures would fall off.
I started to speak.
Let's see. My daughter was born in 76.
So right around 1976/77,
is where I started to speak,
Herbert Cohen, myself,
and I don't remember who they were.
But there were three of us who
were the original speakers.
They would either come to the museum
or we would go to different schools.
That's how we started by going to different schools.
In 96 when the Olympics were here in Atlanta,
the Federation moved to Spring Street.
Ben Hirsch was the third one.
He was the architect
of the museum where we are now at the Breman.
He's also the architect.
What I didn't know is that one of
the first monuments to
the holocaust is right here in Atlanta,
Georgia at Greenwood cemetery.
So he was the architect
of the monument at Greenwood cemetery.
I started to speak in 76/77.
The joke has become is that
my wife who's the native Southern,
native Georgia, I've been to
more places in Georgia than she ever knew existed.
I was appointed to the Georgia Commission
on the Holocaust by Governor Barnes.
And when Governor Perdue was elected,
all of us had to submit our resignations.
They were all accepted,
and he reappointed half the old commission
and half a new commission with his people on it.
But before I was reappointed,
Lieutenant Governor Mark Taylor asked me to write
down all the places that I had spoken in, in Georgia.
And I sat there with a map
of Georgia when my wife was with
me and we had a long yellow legal pad.
And by the time we got through,
there were 2.5 pages of
that legal pad of all the places I had spoken in Georgia.
Some of these places when I got there,
I increased the Jewish population by one me.
So I still do a lot of speaking.
I still go down to the Bremen.
Of course, I speak out here at KSU.
I was out here when the Anne Frank exhibit was here.
That's how I started with
my first association with Kennesaw State University.
I don't do as much speaking now as I used to.
I try to limit it.
I tried to speak maybe every other week or so.
But we're very fortunate that
KSU has groups coming through the Breman,
we have from now until the end of the year,
we have groups coming through almost every day.
>> And why is it important for you to speak?
>> I do it as the voice of my family.
When I started to speak,
I always said that I lost 80% of my family in these camps
and I really had no idea what 80% of my family was.
It sounded like a good number.
My mother was down here visiting from New York and
HBO was showing the Simon Wiesenthal story
the Murderers Amongst Us.
In that movie, Mr. Wiesenthal's
daughter asks him why they don't have a lot of family.
Why during holidays,
Bar and bat mitzvah things like that.
They don't have aunts,
uncles, grandparents, and so on.
And he explains to her that they lost
over 70 members of their family during the Holocaust.
And I glance over at my mother
and she's no longer watching the movie,
and I said, "Mama, what are you doing?"
She says, "I'm counting."
I said, "What in heaven's name were you counting?"
She said, "Well, he said 70."
She said, "I can only remember 120."
And that's when it came into full realization
to me what 80% of my family was,
120 of my family members
who were murdered in these camps.
So they don't have a voice anymore.
They have no one to speak for them.
So that's why I go to speak.
I've become their voice.
Unfortunately,
there's a lot of Holocaust denial going on.
There's people who are saying that
there was no such thing as the Holocaust,
that this is all a Zionist Jewish fabrication.
Unfortunately, it's not.
We are losing our survivors.
Our survivors are getting older.
Some of the groups of
students and adults I speak to tell them that they're
going to be the last generation
that hear a living survivor.
Two weeks ago, we lost
another one of our speakers at the Breman.
Allan Alembic passed away at the age of 83.
Thank God, I'm in good health.
Right now, I've recovered.
I was sick, but my strength is back,
and it's important that we keep
the memory of the holocaust.
Even though the Holocaust is one of
the most documented events in human history,
40/50 years from now, who knows?
It's all going to be on tape.
It's all going to be on film
because there won't be any living survivors around.
And it's important that the holocaust be not forgotten.
That's why I do what I do.
>> Thank you, Mr. Kessler.
>> Thank you.